Uplift ideology did gain Atlanta’s black community a measure of political power because it allowed the black vote to be wielded as a bloc. Beginning in the 1930s, voter registration drives in the city slowly increased the power of the black vote, but the power of this bloc was limited. Georgia, one of the first states to attack Reconstruction after the Civil War, was also one of the first states to introduce the poll tax in 1868. The 1877 state constitution, created after the final defeat of the Reconstruction government, established the poll tax as cumulative. This meant that in order to vote a citizen would have to pay taxes for each year since they reached voting age. In 1908 Georgia amended the state constitution adding a literacy test and establishing the white primary, barring blacks from voting in the Democratic Party primaries where most elections were contested. This framework of political obstacles kept black voter registration at low levels for more than six decades.35
Despite this narrow political maneuvering room, Atlanta’s black community was able to win some material gains. Although the white primary meant that African Americans could not vote for most candidates, they could vote in general or special elections. In 1919 and 1921, African Americans voted against and defeated two referenda on school bonds because no funds were dedicated for the black community. After the vote, negotiations between city officials and African American leaders led to a reapportionment of the bond monies and the referenda were
35
passed.36 This dynamic of a black elite negotiating with white political officials set the stage for the city in dealings on racial politics. As late as 1962 the same strategy was used when an $80 million municipal bond, one that did not include funds for black neighborhoods, was rejected. When Mayor Ivan Allen modified the bonds, they passed with overwhelming black support.37
David Andrew Harmon’s analysis of the black political leadership of this period suggests they were dedicated to working within the system of segregation for gradual reforms that did not challenge that system as a whole. Bound by “existing racial attitudes and political realities,” black leadership relied on popular tactics, like rallies and mass meetings, only to “build support for decisions already made or for opponents to constructively vent [black working class]
frustrations.”38 By the mid-1960s, however, working-class frustrations were no longer
containable. Historian Paula Giddings first told the story, often retold, of Dr. Martin Luther King meeting with leaders of the NWRO in 1968. King went to recruit support for the prospective Poor People’s Campaign, an idea first proposed by the NWRO but since appropriated. During the meeting King was eventually chastised by Johnnie Tillmon, a welfare recipient herself and one of the core leaders of the NWRO, for not admitting he did not know about welfare issues.39 Eventually, King accepted the criticism. Working-class black women publicly berating a member of one of Atlanta’s most prominent black families would have been unthinkable just a decade before. This event shows that class was not the only fissure. The community power structure was coming apart along gender lines as well.
Black women have always been part of black political struggle but have not always been
36
Harmon, 13. 37
Winston A. Grady-Willis, Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960- 1977 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 38.
38
Harmon, 34-35. 39
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, 1st Quill ed. (New York: W. Morrow, 1996), 312.
charismatic leaders. Historian Belinda Robnett’s narrative of the post-WWII civil rights movement shows how gender shaped the leadership of that struggle. Robnett coined the term “bridge leaders” to describe black women’s activist role in community mobilization as well as liaisons between the national movement and the local community. Black women became bridge leaders because as they sought participation within the social movement gender “operated as a construct of exclusion,” restricting access to formal leadership roles. While some women were able to break through this barrier, the vast majority of movement spokespeople and public leaders were male.40 This does not mean women did not hold formal leadership positions or that men did not hold informal ones. Rather, it means that gender was a defining factor in how people were socially positioned and therefore how they participated in the social movement. Black women’s social location on the margins of national politics, combined with a constricted political space within black institutions, lead to female over representation as bridge leaders.
Robnett also contends this context, the social constructions of gender, strengthened informal leadership and therefore provided a “strong mobilizing force” at the grassroots. Although Robnett does not use the phrase, this is the concept of subjectification, a Foucaldian term describing how the capacity for action is enabled and created by specific relations of subordination. In short, the ways by which a person is pushed by the hierarchy are also the ways by which that person develops a sense of subjectivity, the view of political self as an individual and in relation to others. This does not necessarily mean the person develops a subjectivity in which they see themselves as inferior, helpless, and without agency. Subjectification explains how social locations shape the use or creation of certain political strategies. In Robnett’s historical study she shows that black women activists of the civil rights movement created their
40
Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20.
own space within the movement. This “free space” she defines as a “niche that is not directly controlled by formal leaders or those in their inner circle. It is an unclaimed space that is nevertheless central to the development of the movement, since linkages are developed within it.” As Robnett explains, gender functioned as an “organizational construct” within the free space of the social movement to create new leaders within the social movement.41 Black women were pushed into a gendered social location within the civil rights movement. They then turned that location into a free space, a political tool, to increase the effectiveness of that movement. Clearly these women were not helpless, whether or not they could name the gender forces they were operating within. Subjectification simply renders the space visible without dismissing or
romanticizing these women’s efforts. By drawing all of this information together, one can paint a picture of black women’s free space in Atlanta over the course of the civil rights struggle.
Uplift ideology meant black, working-class women were involved in the city’s political struggle but rarely part of the decision-making process. During the post-war years these same women created space within the social movement where their leadership was developed. This same leadership was put to the test as the movement mounted more direct challenges to Jim Crow. Through the mid-1960s most of these women participated in the social movement through established organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and later through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). While many historians have focused on the difference between SNCC’s and SCLC’s stance on nonviolence or black power, Robnett points to the two organization’s differences in leadership development as more fundamental. SCLC was built on the male charismatic leadership model that allowed women’s participation but also constrained it. SNCC also constrained women’s participation through
41
socially constructed ideas of gender. However, the organization’s focus on the building of decentralized grassroots leadership created a different kind of space, one where women could contest formal leadership positions if not always hold them.42 SCLC’s leadership model was still connected to, if not rooted in, uplift ideology. SNCC’s model was, by contrast, a more egalitarian one. The activists in SCLC and SNCC represented two poles within the civil rights activist spectrum in Atlanta, but the working-class women involved would not automatically be included in either. In 1966 those women declared their independence from existing civil rights
organizations, and that led to a formalization of their space around welfare rights.